Star Struck

by Val McDermid

  I took a deep breath and pressed the bell. A light went on in the hall, illuminating me with green and scarlet patterns from the stained glass. I saw a dark shape descend the stairs and loom towards me. The door opened and Dorothea Dawson’s genetic inheritance stood in front of me. I should have seen it, really. The features were so similar.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’ve come for a chat about your mum.”

  Chapter 18

  SATURN OPPOSES URANUS

  Whenever she seems about to carve out a destiny or even a destination, Uranus steps in to force her to kick over the traces and express her individuality. Something always disrupts her best-laid plans; she is forever having to include new elements in her arrangements. The rest of her chart indicates capability; she will succeed in a conventional world by unconventional means.

  From Written in the Stars, by Dorothea Dawson

  Freddie Littlewood blinked rapidly, dark eyes glittering. His thin lips twitched. It was hard to tell if he was furious or on the point of tears. I figured he was deciding whether to brazen it out or to deny all knowledge of what I was talking about. It was possible, after all, that I was only guessing. “My private life is no concern of yours,” he said eventually, sitting firmly on the fence.

  I sighed. “That’s where you’re wrong, Freddie. I’m very concerned with the relationship between you and Dorothea. The nature of my concern rather depends on whether you killed her or not. If you did, it puts my client in the clear and it probably means Gloria isn’t the next target of a killer. If you didn’t, you can probably tell me things that would help me to protect her. Either from false accusation or from murder. So my concern is legitimate.”

  “I’ve nothing to say to you,” he said, closing the door in my face.

  I hate bad manners. Especially when it’s late and there are almost certainly more interesting things I could be doing with my time. I took out my mobile phone and pushed open the letterbox. “The police don’t know Dorothea was your mother.” I started to press numbers on the phone, hoping the beeping was evident on the other side of the door. “Want me to tell them now?”

  Before I could have pressed the “send” button if I’d been serious, the door opened again. “There’s no need for this,” Freddie snapped. “I didn’t kill Dorothea. That’s all you need to know. And it’s all you’re getting from me. I don’t care if you tell the police she was my birth mother. It’s not like it was news to me. I’ve known for ages, and I can prove it. Even the police aren’t stupid enough to take that as a motive for murder.” He was probably right. The bitterness in his voice spelled motive to me, but acrimony’s never been grounds for arresting someone.

  I leaned against the doorjamb and smiled. “Maybe so. But if you factor in the stories you’ve been selling to the papers, the picture looks very different. Intimate details that people have revealed to Dorothea, spiced with the snippets you’ve picked up, that’s what’s been tarted up in the tabloids. Maybe Dorothea decided she didn’t need a partner any more?”

  His eyes widened and he flashed a panicky glance to either side of me, as if checking whether I was alone. “You’re talking rubbish,” he said, his voice venomous.

  I smiled. “Have it your own way. But you didn’t get paid in cash. Somewhere there’s a paper trail. And one thing the stupid old plod is very good at is following a paper trail. Freddie, if what you’re saying is true, and you didn’t kill Dorothea, I’ve got no ax to grind with you. John Turpin isn’t paying me to find out who the Northerners mole is.” I refrained from mentioning that Ross Grant might be. There was no point in complicating things that were already difficult. “All I’m interested in is protecting Gloria. You like Gloria, for God’s sake, I know you do. I’ve seen the way you are with her. Can we not just sit down and talk about this? Or do I have to blow your life out of the water with NPTV as well as the cops?”

  One side of his mouth lifted in a sneer. “Gloria said you were smart,” he said, opening the door wide enough to let me enter. He shooed me ahead of him into a small square dining room. There was an oak table with four matching chairs, all stripped back to the bare wood, oiled and polished till they gleamed in the soft glow of opalescent wall lights. A narrow sideboard in darker oak sat against the far wall. The only decoration came from the vibrant color of the

  “How did you find out she was my birth mother?” he asked.

  I raised one shoulder in a shrug. “There’s not much a good hacker can’t find out these days. How did you find out?”

  He ran his thumb along the sharp line of his jaw in a curious stropping gesture. “A mixture of luck and hard work,” he said. “The first time I got into a serious relationship, when I was in my twenties, I decided I wanted to know where I’d come from. It hadn’t seemed important before, but the idea of being with someone long term, maybe even having kids with them, made me curious. I searched the records, and found out my father was already dead. Killed by a heart attack.” He gave a bitter cough of laughter. “Not bad for a heartless bastard. I carried on looking and I discovered my mother was Dorothea Thompson, née Dawson. But the trail went cold.” His eyes were alert, never leaving my face. I suspected he was watching for any signs that he was breaking new ground, revealing things I didn’t already know.

  “I know about the breakdown,” I said. “Was that where the trail petered out?”

  He nodded. “She was released from the hospital still using her married name, and she disappeared without trace. I found a cousin, the only other member of the family still alive, but he had no idea what had happened to her. The only useful thing I got from him was a copy of her wedding picture. I even hired one of your lot, but he never found her. Then one day I was sitting in the staff canteen at NPTV and Edna Mercer walked in with her latest fad. It was like someone took my stomach in their fist and squeezed it tight. I didn’t need to hear her name to know who she was. That was just confirmation of what I knew the minute I saw her face. All those years later, she was still the spitting image of her wedding picture.”

  “But you didn’t rush across the room and reveal you were her long-lost son.”

  He gave a twisted smile. “When I started out looking for my

  I couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t offensively trite. My childhood was breathtaking in its comforting and confident normality. When I’d fallen over, there had been someone there to pick me up and stick a plaster on my knee. I’d fallen asleep with stories, not nightmares. There had always been arms to hold me and faces to reflect pride in my achievement. I could barely imagine the yawning gap of such an absence, never mind the agony of having it filled with such poisonous viciousness. “You must have come to hate her,” I said, surprised by the huskiness of my voice.

  He shifted in his chair so his face was obscured by shadow, his spiky hair emphasized in a dark fragmented halo. With his black polo neck and black trousers, he looked like a satanic ghost. “I wanted to make her life a misery too,” he said. “I wanted her to understand something about the pain and misery she’d given me.”

  “I don’t think she had a lot of choice in the matter.”

  “More choice than I did,” he blazed back at me. “She could have come looking for me. It couldn’t have been that hard to find a child in care. But she made the decision to leave me in whatever hell I happened to be in.”

  In the silence that swallowed his outburst, I thought of how it must have been for Dorothea. Tainted with the stigma of mental illness, abandoned by her husband, wrenched from her child, without resources. She couldn’t go home for she had no home to go to. The village where she’d grown up was the one place she’d

  “She tried to get me to fall for that line,” he said scornfully. “No way. She never came after me. She left me to it. And my problem is that I’m not stupid. I know I’m fucked up. And I know exactly how and why. I’m fucked up because she left me to rot, to be abused, to be fucked over. And that’s why I didn’t murder her. I hated her far too much to give her the easy wa
y out. I wanted her to go on suffering a whole lot longer. She still had years to pay for.”

  Strangely, I believed him. The vitriol in his voice was the real thing, so strong it made the air tremble. “So you didn’t let on when you realized Edna Mercer’s latest discovery was your mother?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t say a word. I just watched her, every chance I got. I listened to the actors talking about her when I made them up. At first, I was confused. It was like part of me desperately wanted to love her and be loved back. And another part of me wanted revenge. I just sat it out, waited to see which side would win.” Freddie shifted in his chair, folding his arms across his stomach and bending forward. Lit from above, his eyes were impenetrable pools in shadowy sockets. “It was no contest, not really. The more they went on about how lovely she was, the more I resented what she’d deprived me of. I wanted revenge.”

  “But you ended up in business with her. Earning money together,” I said, trying not to show how baffled I was by that. I suspected that he still harbored a determination not to tell me any more than I already knew.

  He looked up then and stared into my face. He gave a strange barking cough of laughter. “Don’t you get it? That was my revenge. One night, I waited till her last client had gone and I walked into the van. I told her my date, time and place of birth and watched the color drain out of her face. I didn’t have to tell her who I was.

  “You see, if she revealed that I was her son, it wouldn’t just be another happy tabloid reunion story. She’d have to explain how she came to give me up in the first place. She’d have to tell the world she was a nutter. Most people find mental illness frightening. She was convinced that she’d lose her contracts, lose her clients at Northerners and end up back where she was all those years ago when she came out of the mental hospital. I think she was wrong, but it suited me that she believed it. That way, I had leverage. I made her tell me people’s secrets and then I sold them. She had this phony reverence thing about her psychic gift. She was always going on about being like a priest or a doctor, the repository of people’s confidences.” His contemptuous impersonation was frighteningly accurate; if I’d been the superstitious type, I’d have sworn I could see Dorothea’s ghost rising up before me.

  “In that case, why did she tell you?”

  “I was her son,” he said simply. “She wanted to please me. It helped that she was desperate to keep our relationship secret, so she needed to keep me sweet.”

  “So you put together what she winkled out from her clients with what people let slip in the make-up chair, and with the overlap between two sources you were able to expose all those people who probably think of you as a friend?” I said.

  “Don’t make me laugh,” he said bitterly. “I’m not a friend to them. I’m a servant, a convenience. Oh sure, they treat me like I’m their best buddy, but if I died tonight I doubt if more than three of them would make it to the funeral, and then only if they knew the photographers were going to be there. The program’s last publicist, he made the mistake of thinking they were his friends. He had a breakdown—too much stress. One cast member sent him a get-well card. One sent him a bunch of flowers. And that was it. He’d been working his socks off to cover their backs for the best part of five years, and the day he went sick, it was as if he’d never

  “Wasn’t it a bit of a risk, revealing secrets people knew they’d told Dorothea? Didn’t anybody put two and two together?”

  He shook his head, a smirk on his narrow mouth. “I always waited a few months. I used the time to do a bit more digging, see if I could come up with extra information, stuff my mother hadn’t been told about. Once you know where to look, it’s amazing what you can find out.”

  Tell me about it, I thought, feeling a strange pity for this damaged man who’d subverted the tricks of my trade and used them to generate misery. “I suppose leaking the storylines as well helped to cover your tracks.”

  He frowned. “Storylines? That wasn’t me. I never really know the storylines in advance. Just bits and pieces I pick up from what people say. I’d heard it’s supposed to be somebody in the location catering company doing that. Turpin’s giving them the heave, and they’re getting their own back. That’s what I’d heard.”

  I couldn’t help believing him. He’d been so honest about the other stuff, and that painted him in a far worse light. Besides, he was completely off-hand on the subject. I’d begun to realize that Freddie Littlewood was intense about the things at the heart of his life. Anything else was insignificant. “Did you make her take some of the money too?” I asked.

  “I tried. But she wouldn’t cash the checks. I even paid cash into her bank account once. The next week, she gave me a receipt from Save the Children for the exact same amount.”

  It would have been so simple if I could have persuaded myself Freddie had killed his mother. All the pieces were there; a racket selling stories to the press that worked primarily because their relationship remained secret; a falling out among thieves, aggravated by the emotional charge of their relationship; a spur of the moment act of shocking violence. The only problem was that it wasn’t true. And if I gave Cliff Jackson the pieces, he’d force them to fit the pattern his closed mind would impose.

  But if it wasn’t Freddie, who else? Who else would benefit from

  “I know I wasn’t,” he said decisively. “When I told her I was going to start selling the stories to the papers, she said that if I needed money, all I had to do was ask. She said that as soon as she’d satisfied herself that I really was her son, she’d changed her will in my favor. She said I might as well have the money now, while she was still alive and we could enjoy it together. I told her I didn’t want her money, that wasn’t the point. I wasn’t selling the stories to make a few bob. I was doing it to hurt her. The money was just a bonus. She told me if I went ahead with it, she’d change her will back again and leave all her money to mental health charities.”

  “I bet she didn’t do it,” I said.

  He moved his head almost imperceptibly from side to side, rubbing his thumb along his jaw again. “You didn’t know Dorothea. The week after the first story was published, she sent me a photocopy of her new will. Dated, signed, witnessed. Apart from a few small legacies to friends, everything she owns goes to charity.”

  “It could have been a bluff. She might also have made a second will leaving it all to you.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. If she had, I think the police would have been round. Either that or the solicitor would have been on the phone. No, she meant it. I don’t mind, you know. I’ve never expected anything good from life. That way, you’re not disappointed.” Freddie pushed his chair back, the legs squeaking on the parquet floor. He looked down anxiously, checking the polished surface wasn’t scarred.

  I stood up. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  His wary look was back. “Why? I wasn’t part of her life. I don’t know who her friends were outside Northerners. I don’t even know if she had any lovers.” He sighed. “In all the ways that count, we were strangers, Kate.” It was the first time he’d used my name.

  I followed him to the door. As we emerged into the hall, a woman was coming downstairs wrapped in a fluffy toweling

  I took my cue from Freddie and grinned inanely at the woman who continued down the stairs and gave me a trusting smile. She had a disturbing resemblance to Thumper the rabbit but with none of his street smarts. “Hello and goodbye, Stacey,” I said, noticing that she looked a good ten years younger than Freddie.

  “Maybe see you another time, eh?” she said, standing back to let me reach the front door.

  “Maybe,” I lied, suddenly feeling claustrophobic. I turned the knob on the lock and let the night in. “See you, Freddie.”

  “Thanks, Kate.”

  I looked back once, as I turned out of the gate. His slim frame was silhouetted dark against the light spilling out of the hallway, Stacey a white blob beside him. I didn’t fancy her job one l
ittle bit.

  My stomach hurt. Not because of the nagging sense of failure but because it was a very long time since I’d last eaten. I stopped at the first chippie I came to and sat in the car eating very fishy cod and soggy chips, watching tiny stutters of snow struggling to turn into a blizzard. They were getting nowhere fast, just like me. So far, I had no idea who’d been sending hate mail to Gloria Kendal, or why. I had no idea who had killed Dorothea Dawson, or why, or whether they posed a threat to Gloria or anybody else. I couldn’t even clear my sort-of other client, Ross Grant, because the only mole I could substitute for him in Turpin’s firing line was someone who had even more to lose. My assistant had been arrested more times than I’d had hot dinners all week, my computer specialist was in love with somebody who might not even exist and one of my best friends was in jail.

  It was just as well none of the women’s magazines were

  I scrunched up the chip papers and tossed them into the passenger footwell. I hoped I’d remember to dump them when I got home, otherwise the car would smell of fish and vinegar until the first sunroof day of spring. Home seemed even less appetizing, somehow. The idea of an empty house and an empty bed felt too much like film noir for my taste.

  I had a reasonably good idea where Richard might have gone. Since he’d planned a romantic night in, he wouldn’t have made any plans to listen to a live band. That meant he’d have chosen somewhere he could sit in a corner with a beer and a joint and listen to techno music so loud it would make his vertebrae do the cha-cha. I knew he wouldn’t have ventured further afield than the city center when the roads were so treacherous and there was no one to drive him home. There were only a couple of places that fitted the bill.